Suffering changes your brain.
Long term trauma, of any kind, can lead to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD).
Chronic abuse, can be re-experienced again and again in your mind, stressing your brain and body. You learn to remain constantly anxious and on edge. You also likely learn to live an exhausting, survivalist existence. C-PTSD, is a highly cryptic form of PTSD because the triggers are not always clear. It may result if your brain has been trained for such long periods to operate on fear, constantly attuned to the traumatic patterns you endured.
If you are living this way, to continue moving forward, you may have had to find a way to keep yourself safe in an unsafe world.
Perhaps your brain adapted. Maybe it protected you the best way it could from pain and overwhelm.
How?
If you are like many trauma sufferers your brain could have found ways to distance you from yourself, or mentally push away percieved threats.
We Call it Complex PTSD Dissociation
Essentially, complex PTSD dissociation is a stress response that causes a broken mental and emotional link between things or experiences you would normally associate with one another. For instance, abuse that should be terrifying may not cause any emotion at all if your brain has learned to dissociate.
You process life very differently to accommodate the upsetting way you learned to see the world.
In fact, it is common for dissociation to create disturbances in awareness, personal identity, perception, and recall or memory.
Who you are, how you think of yourself, and the way you live your life becomes disrupted by this way of coping with the trauma.
Beressal Vanderkolk, the best selling author of the Body Keeps Score, wrote, '[w]hile dissociation may temporarily serve an adaptive function, in the long range, lack of integration of traumatic memories seems to be the critical element that leads to the development of the complex biobehavioral change that we call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Intense arousal seems to interfere with proper information processing and the storage of information into narrative (explicit) memory."
Typically, there are five key forms of complex PTSD dissociation.
5 Ways the Brain Naturally Protects During Long Term Trauma
1. Depersonalization (“out-of-body” experiences)
Think of this experience as a significant feeling of detachment from your body. Some people even feel completely alienated from it, unable to recognize their own hands or face.
2. Derealization (nothing seems "real")
If the world seems dreamlike or fake, you may be experiencing derealization. In this state, the world feels unreal or foggy. It might seem as though the things you witness are happening in a movie, far away from you.
3. Amnesia ("losing" time)
Unlike the type of amnesia most of us see in movies or television shows, dissociative amnesia is not a failure to recall personal information or losing whole identities, relationships, or histories. Nor is it routine forgetfulness. Generally, dissociative amnesia is “losing” a disturbing event or painful blocks of time. You might forget anything from key moments to entire months or years.
Often, the amnesias occur in micro-amounts, in present time. Your brain tries to protect you by blocking difficult discussions, leaving you confused and struggling to keep pace with current interactions.
4. Identity confusion (“not yourself”)
If you sense that you don’t know who you are, what you like, or what matters to you, you may be experiencing dissociative identity confusion. In other words, what you know about yourself has shifted.
Typically, those who deal with identity confusion find that risky behavior such as substance abuse or sexual acting out induce a sense of excitement when you may have ordinarily stayed away from such behavior or found it off-putting.
5. Identity alteration (personality "switch")
You may sense that one part of yourself is very different from the “real” you.
Most often this happens subtly but the changes are distinctly observable. People may notice that your voice tone and language style change abruptly. The way you move your body of facial muscles may seem odd and unlike you depending on what you’re discussing. A part of you is acting independently of the "real" you.
Authors of The Stranger in the Mirror, Marlene Steinberg and Maxine Schnall, write that, often, there is a “ping-pong” game of personality states controlling the way a person managing this type of dissociation thinks, remembers and expresses themselves."
For the most part, understand that when the brain protects you through this method of dissociation, it may not be readily apparent to you. Work with a therapist will be necessary to help you understand what is happening.
Finally...
Complex PTSD Dissociation is like a mental room divider. Your brain wants you to be in a safe room. Free of fear, guilt, and shame. When life becomes intense, dissociative symptoms can be a respite for a while.
However, complex PTSD dissociation uses walls like minimization, denial, and suppression to keep trauma in check. You deserve better. You can be happy living as your full self.
Reach out for help resolving your past. Put traumatic memories and fears to rest for good. With help, you can move ahead, freer and lighter, without leaving parts of yourself in the dark.
If you would like some extra support with complex PTSD dissociation and are looking for a psychotherapist, please contact me for a free 30-minute consultation to learn about how I can be of service.
To find out more about my services click here: PTSD Treatment. Serving Boulder, Longmont, Denver.
For your other needs, you can count on April Lyons Psychotherapy Group, to help you heal and grow through EMDR therapy, somatic therapy, and trauma therapy – because we believe in your strength and potential for recovery.
